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Chasing Rabbit Trails

Spring is in the air and lazy days of summer are in the immediate future.  My thoughts wander as I view fresh flowers sprouting and buds appearing on the trees.  In genealogy lessons, instructions are to create a research plan, stay focused and be diligent.  While I agree, when spring fever arrives I find it difficult to follow rigid schedules.  During my online searches from home and in research travels, I allow thirty minutes or so for random searches.  I call these mini sessions “Chasing Rabbit Trails.” Some trails are dead ends and some only lead to a rabbit hole. Amazingly, many of my proven lines began with randomly chasing a single clue.

Ancestors Speak Out: Creating Scenes in Your Family History Book

How do you write about the past in ways that bring the characters to life, while being true to the facts of the time and place? By writing “…books that communicate information in a scenic, dramatic fashion,” says Lee Gutkind, who was once described by Vanity Fair magazine as “The Godfather” of creative nonfiction.

Reflections on ‘The Dash’ by Linda Ellis

I recently attended with my fiancee the funeral of a young man who not only died too young, but to whom my fiancee had been a sort of second “mother,” his being not just a contemporary of her own children, but living in the neighborhood, thus spending many hours in her home as a child, so his death struck particularly close to her. While I never met the young man, I have reached an age where it is not unusual to pick up a newspaper or receive a phone call, email or letter, and learn of the death of someone I not only knew, but remembered fondly, with it becoming increasingly common for those persons to be my age if not younger!

How Wildcard Searches Can Uncover Ancestors

As part of the exercise, we matched the records to the on-line index of the NYC Health Department. While initially creating some of the records and, later, doing some of the matching, I gained a renewed appreciation for wildcards. First, while at least 90% of the records created by the Church were readable, I could not guarantee some of my transcriptions. Then, when I did the matching, it became clear I was not alone. I found some obvious mistakes in both databases and even some data entry errors where one groom was matched to two different brides and visa-versa. Having spent over 30 years in Information Technology, I was not at all surprised. To err is human.

Finding Your Female Ancestors Through Pension Files

Pension files are a great place to find our female ancestors. I didn’t know who my great, great grandmother was until I obtained my great, great grandfather, John Malin Carder’s Civil War pension files. In those files, I learned that John had been married three times.  First, to Elizabeth Steen and then to Caroline Morris. Both died very young. John then married Eliza Jane Dobbins to whom he was married until his death nearly sixty years later.

Family History Begins at the End of Your Comfort Zone

If you have ever been interested in finding out more about your ancestors, realize that what you learn and what you discover can’t be unseen or unheard and the stories you uncover may astound and even upset you.